Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Explorer SettingsHow often have you wondered if your Minelab Explorer is setup properly? Do you wonder if you're getting as much depth as you should, or if you're missing targets, or passing up good targets thinking they're trash? This little primer will give you some things to think about...

The first thing I usually try to do is think about what I'm trying to find. That will dictate what Sounds mode I will use. There's two (well, actually three) sounds modes in the Explorer:

Constant

Conduct

Ferrous

We'll ignore the Constant mode for now, as that just makes for a beep beep type of response. Since you bought an Explorer, let's assume you don't want this! :)

I select Conduct (Conductive) mode when I'm searching for silver. The reason is that in Conduct mode things that appear in the upper portion of the SmartScreen come through the headphones as a higher pitch than when they are low on the screen. Silver will always be in the upper right corner of the screen, and represents both highly conductive and hightly inductive metal. In this mode, things like foil and other low conductors will grunt, or be very obviously a low tone. Nickels, for example, will be very low in tone.

Conduct mode is the mode I use when hunting turf parks for deep silver.

Be careful though - Conduct mode can also accentuate rusted iron falses and make them seem like silver targets.

Ferrous mode, on the other hand, I use in most other environments. Places like an urban demolition site, the beach, or England, because in these sites I dig EVERYTHING that isn't iron. The reason I change to ferrous mode at these sites is because ferrous mode accentuates lower conductors. Foil will actually have a nice, mid-range tone to it in most cases. It's often easy to miss foil or other low conductors in Conduct mode because in that mode those tones are very similar to iron...which brings me to my next point with respect to ferrous mode...

Iron Mask -16! Iron Mask -16!? Are you nuts!?!? That allows one to hear every little hunk of iron, and everything else. Yes, I'm serious, and the reason is simple - I like to hear everything under my coil. It helps me to know how dense a site is in terms of targets. If there's a lot of iron, I need to slow way down to hear conductive targets in between the bits of iron. If the site is clean (very little iron) I'll be able to move quicker. Often, if a conductive target is near an iron target, you'll be able to hear it because the Explorer isn't nulling over the iron as it would be if you had any more than -16 on the Iron Mask.

With IM-16, it can be quite chatty. It takes time to get used to it. Once used to it, you can be a master of your dirt!